Not A Chimp, Not Even Close

I have just put a commentary on the OUP US blog about the relevance of the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus - Ardi - to the general thrust and argument of NOT A CHIMP. Basically, it's bad news for those scientists who over-stress the proximity of humans and chimps and have assumed that the common ancestor of both chimps and man must have looked very much like a chimp.

Understanding Others' Regret: An fMRI Study

An article in this week's PLoS 1 journal from the Giacomo Rizzolatti stable in Italy. They used fMRI to measure activity in parts of the brain when subjects felt regret, or witnessed a regretful outcome for someone else, on a gambling task. The same parts of the brain were activated on both occasions - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and hippocampus. This "resonant" mechanism in this context, they believe, demonstrates mirror system action involving a complex, cognitively-generated emotion, rather than a basic emotion like fear or hate.

Chimps Will Help But You Have To Ask

Most of the experiments contrived to test chimpanzee altruism centre around food sharing - which chimps are not good at because they do not do it in the wild. Therefore most researchers conclude chimps are very selfish. Here Shinya Yamamoto and colleagues decided to frame the question differently by having a chimp give or withhold an implement necessary to access food from another chimp. A pole to retrieve out-of-reach food, or a straw to push into the hole on a drinks carton, for instance. They noted that chimps were more likely to help out by making the tool available to another chimp than expected. This was more likely to happen if the chimps were related, as in a mother-offspring pair, or if the requester was a dominant. The chimps would only make the tool available if the other chimp begged for it, suggesting they were unable to read the other chimp's predicament and intentions unless an obvious sign of need was made. This suggests again that chimps may lack aspects of theory-of-mind we humans have and which informs our behaviour toward each other.

Chimp Owner Seeks To Limit Victim's Claim

Nice little piece about the attempt of Sandra Herold's attorney (Herold owned the chimpanzee Travis who went berserk and mauled her friend in Stamford, CT last February) to limit the potential damages of the ensuing legal case by claiming that, since the friend, Charla Nash, was also an employee of Herold's trucking firm, and was helping round up the escaped Travis at the time, and that Travis was heavily identified as the trucking firm's logo, the attack was an industrial accident and not simply the wanton berserk attack of a wild animal for which Herold should shoulder responsibility. Under worker's compensation she would receive far less than the $50 million suit presently leveled against her!

BBC Radio Ulster "Sunday Sequence"

I can be heard debating chimp cognition and the value or otherwise of according them human rights on Radio Ulster's "Sunday Sequence" today - 11th October. To my surprise, William announced, just before we were to go to record, that he had studied at Princeton under Peter Singer, the philosopher who started off the Great Ape Project! It added a certain friendly bite to the proceedings!! It will be on BBC iPlayer for one week.

Vocal Imitation In Bats

Behavioural ecologist Mirjam Knornschild has been studying vocal imitation in sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata) in Costa Rica. Like song-birds and baby humans, the young bats begin babbling between 2 and 6 weeks old and this babbling slowly progresses to complete renditions of territorial songs. The young bats did not learn only from adult male kin, but from any mature harem male, who acted like a tutor. This bears uncanny similarity to the research on zebra finches by Constance Sharrff, which found that, like humans, there was a window when vocalizations could be learned and that expression of the gene FOXP2 soared in those parts of the avian brain associated with vocal learning and production. We already know (see my chapter THE LANGUAGE GENE THAT WASN'T in NOT A CHIMP) a number of bat species show considerable sequence variation on the FOXP2 gene. It would be very interesting to see if FOXP2 expression rose significantly in the young bats' brains, and where, during this period of acquisition of vocalizations.